Laravel 12 Is Here - What Your Business Needs to Know

Laravel 12 officially dropped on 24th February 2025, and as a team that builds and maintains APIs with Laravel day in, day out, we wanted to break down what this release actually means for businesses running Laravel applications.

The good news? This is one of the smoothest major version upgrades Laravel has ever shipped. The Laravel team deliberately focused on minimising breaking changes this cycle, making it what they describe as a "maintenance release" to upgrade existing dependencies. For most applications, the upgrade can be completed without changing any application code at all.

What Has Actually Changed?

Laravel 12 is not a dramatic overhaul. Instead, it builds on the solid foundations laid in Laravel 11 with a focus on updated upstream dependencies and some genuinely useful new features.

The headline addition is the introduction of brand new starter kits for React, Vue, and Livewire. These starter kits now include the option of using WorkOS AuthKit for user authentication, which opens the door to social authentication, passkeys, and SSO support straight out of the box. For businesses building customer-facing applications, this is a significant time saver.

Under the bonnet, Laravel 12 now requires Carbon 3, dropping support for Carbon 2.x entirely. Carbon is the date and time library used throughout the framework, and version 3 brings performance improvements along with a cleaner API. For most applications, this change will be seamless, but it is worth verifying any direct Carbon usage in your codebase.

The HasUuids trait now generates UUIDv7 by default rather than UUIDv4. UUIDv7 identifiers are time-ordered, which means better database index performance. If your application relies on UUIDv4 behaviour, you can switch to the new HasVersion4Uuids trait with a simple change.

PHP Version Requirements

Laravel 12 requires PHP 8.2 or higher, supporting PHP 8.2 through 8.4. If your application is still running on PHP 8.1 or earlier, you will need to upgrade your PHP version before moving to Laravel 12. This is something we strongly recommend regardless of your Laravel version, as older PHP versions eventually stop receiving security patches.

The Upgrade Path from Laravel 11

The official estimate for upgrading from Laravel 11 to 12 is around five minutes. That is not a typo. Because the Laravel team concentrated on minimising breaking changes, most of the work involves updating your composer.json dependencies.

The key dependency changes are updating laravel/framework to ^12.0, phpunit/phpunit to ^11.0, and pestphp/pest to ^3.0 if you use Pest for testing.

There are a handful of other changes worth noting. The image validation rule now excludes SVGs by default, which is actually a sensible security improvement. Schema inspection methods like Schema::getTables() now return results from all schemas by default rather than just the current one. And database grammar constructors now require a connection instance to be passed directly.

For teams that want to automate the process, Laravel Shift can handle the upgrade automatically and will even modernise your PHP syntax and apply code style improvements at the same time.

What About Laravel 11 Support?

If you are currently running Laravel 11 and are not ready to upgrade just yet, you still have time. Laravel 11 will continue to receive bug fixes until September 2025 and security fixes until March 2026. However, we would encourage planning your upgrade sooner rather than later. Staying on the current supported version means you benefit from the latest security patches and dependency updates as they land.

Why Staying Current Matters

Every major Laravel release brings updated dependencies, and those dependencies include security fixes that protect your application and your users' data. Falling behind on framework versions does not just mean missing out on new features. It means accumulating technical debt and, more critically, running software that may contain known vulnerabilities.

We have seen businesses running Laravel applications two or three major versions behind, and the cost of catching up grows with every release you skip. A five-minute upgrade today prevents a five-day upgrade eighteen months from now.

New Starter Kits - A Closer Look

For new projects, the updated starter kits are worth a closer look. The React starter kit ships with Inertia.js, React 19, full TypeScript support, and Tailwind CSS. If you are building a modern single-page application backed by a Laravel API, this gives you a production-ready foundation with minimal configuration.

The Vue and Livewire starter kits follow a similar pattern, each tailored to their respective ecosystems. As a team that prefers React and Next.js for our frontend work, we are particularly pleased to see React getting first-class treatment in the Laravel ecosystem.

What We Recommend

If you are running Laravel 11, plan your upgrade to Laravel 12. The minimal breaking changes make this one of the easiest upgrades in Laravel's history. Start by checking your PHP version, review any direct Carbon usage, and test in a staging environment before deploying.

If you are running Laravel 10 or earlier, now is the time to get serious about your upgrade path. Laravel 10 reaches end of security support in February 2026, and skipping multiple major versions makes the process significantly more complex.

If you need help upgrading your Laravel application or want to discuss how to keep your API infrastructure current, get in touch with us. Keeping your software up to date is one of the most important things you can do for the security and reliability of your business.